September 20, 2021 - Can you find The Gambia on a globe? Either way, it is the only nation on Earth that is successfully living up to its commitments under the Paris Accord on climate change.

That's how serious the Paris Accord is — no one is living up to their commitments except for The Gambia. Aren't you glad President Biden's first act in office was to rejoin the accord?

According to a new report from Climate Action Tracker, the United States and Germany are doing an "insufficient" job. China, the world's largest emitter of carbon dioxide, is doing a "highly insufficient" job in curbing those emissions.

Usually, the most astounding thing about government actions on climate change is the way Western leaders live in denial. They pretend their own nations' emissions mean something when China continues to build coal-fired power plants and flatly refuses to participate meaningfully in emissions reduction. Speaking of which, China just rebuffed John Kerry's request that it undertake serious emissions reductions, which the Paris Accord did not require of it. Maybe the Obama administration should have negotiated a bit better. And as a consequence, there is no chance that the world will reduce global atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide.

But that's not the most striking thing. What is most striking is the arrogant idiocy of the world's leaders, who believe they can change the weather by signing treaties and talking to each other. It isn't so, and all past experience in this regard has demonstrated that it isn't so.

Simply find and glance at a chart of the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere over the last 50 years. From the straight diagonal line, it immediately becomes obvious that no treaty, agreement, or accord, from Kyoto to Paris, has had even the slightest effect in causing carbon dioxide to change its steady rate of accumulation in Earth's atmosphere.

Fortunately, climate change is not a crisis. It is an easily solved problem. If you want to reduce greenhouse emissions from electricity, there's exactly one proven way to do it — do what France did. Begin a long-term project to convert all or nearly all of the grid to nuclear power. No other method has ever worked or come close. (Well, except maybe in The Gambia.)

Natural gas, including the new technology of zero-emission natural gas, is still helping the U.S. reduce its emissions. It is a cheap and useful fuel, and it will be the best bridge to nuclear, perhaps along with certain economically useful carbon capture technologies. Nuclear can in turn become the bridge to fusion, which will come online in a demonstration capacity at MIT within five years and should be everywhere within 30 years. Fusion has all of nuclear's advantages, but without any of the danger or radioactive waste. Because the products of fusion cannot be weaponized as with nuclear fission, it is a technology the U.S. and its allies can share even with enemies such as China, Russia, and Iran.

That's the answer to carbon emissions — everything else is already a proven waste of time. Those who reject nuclear, including most of the American Left, are not serious about the issue and should not be included in any conversation about the climate. They are just looking for new ways to hinder the economic growth that limitless energy will give humanity and new excuses to "tax the rich."

Given that effective and economically feasible options already exist for solving climate change, Biden should immediately abandon expensive pie-in-the-sky Green New Deal projects — and also stop signing silly treaties that let China pollute as much as it likes.